IOTC Conference

23Jun08

Last Thursday and Friday I was at the IOTC, an Open Source Conference. I went to a few talks

1) Saw Geoffrey Grosenbach talking about Phusion Passenger. The talk target was a bit too wide, however i think he was good at explaining some of the basics. It would have been good to see some sample code but hey. All in all interesting

2) Talk by Clint Oram the guy from Sugar CRM, well he was basically evangelising about Open Source in general, TBH It was really boring, maybe i just didnt understand the whole topic of the talk … I believe most of us in the audience were developers, I wish he showed us some goodness, some features, some smart API …or how do they manage their interactions with all the developers in !=locations, how do they evaluate whats code to include or not, who is in charge of that, etc …He mentioned some deal that they(Sugar CRM) made with hosting 365 and Clint is now living in Ireland.

3) WURFL and WALL. This talk was the start of a really interesting day and a great talk about something I might be using at some point . WURFL is a Device Description repository, it uses a tag that the device send to find out what capabilities does the device have, WURLF seems to fit in nicely with WALL, a markup language (that reminded me a little to nVelocity) that renders according to the querying device. Really interesting and real cool the way the WURFL file is organized (and a surprising 8Mb File)

4) ZOPE. A Phyton Framework. I think this talked turned out to be very different to what was originally intended however it was good to hear practises applyed to a OS Irish Shop. There was a lot of talk about how their complete process flows, from development to deplyment. For example he mentioned how they use subversion, firebug, how do they use versioning of their phyton and db versions… and then he talked about Zope, I only had a very diluted idea of what was Zope Architecture and what was it supposed to do, I m still not terribly clear however there were some interesting details all the food related stuff was real nice(and good easy to remember names) Eggs, cheeseShop, etc. I must check the entity generation as it sounds very interesting.

The presenter, Con Hennessy works for a company called OpenApp interestingly they deploy solutions for the government, he mentioned the HSE. All in all real interesting

5) PHP Frameworks. This talk really took me by surprise, David Coallier is part of the php core team and he knew what he was on about. He talked about web frameworks: Cake, Zend, Symfony (all MVCs) and Prado( an event driven one that I dont find interesting at all) then he went on talking about testing frameworks (this was really interesting as I knew nothing about php testing frameworks) here the list was PHPUnit, SimpleTest (it looks like he liked this one and I liked the asserts syntax) and another one that was for real low leve testing (hence not interested as I know for sure I m not gonna be debugging php core anytime soon )

ok that s all for today I wanted to add some nice pics but as I was searching I realised i don’t know how to make sure i m not breaking any law by using the image so I ll find out later and go to sleep now